Why SEO + Content + Email Marketing is a Powerful Formula
Introduction
As digital marketing has become increasingly fragmented and complex, we frequently hear clients saying that they're feeling overwhelmed and struggling to decide where to focus their time, budget and marketing efforts.
There are so many things they could be doing, so many channels they could be appearing on, and so many content types they could be creating.
The operative word here is could.
Could doesn't necessarily mean should.
Multi-channel marketing has become the norm. And in many cases, assuming you have the budget and resource, it can be very effective.
But, there are potential problems with multi-channel if you're spreading yourself too thinly to make any significant cut through in any one area.
The result? Overwork, stress, confusion, ineffectiveness, and poor performance. None are good. All are demotivating.
Rarely are marketing budgets an infinite pool of money to dip into whenever you want. It stands to reason that the more channels you have to work on, the less focus, time, attention and budget you may have to spend on them.
Any business that has enjoyed success with its marketing efforts is very aware of the money, effort, and time required to drive a positive ROI from a channel.
If you're trying to work across too many channels, investing reduced budgets into lots of little pieces of low-quality content, imagery, video, research etc., it will likely mean that you're ROI is, at best, low. At worst, negative, where you are wasting money.
Unless you have massive budgets and huge teams of marketers working around the clock, the more channels you focus on, the more likely you'll see a negative impact.
Disclaimer: I am not advocating a lack of testing new opportunities or channels by any means. I think it's a great idea to allocate around 10% of your marketing budget to experiments to assess untapped opportunities. If they're a success, you can double down on them. The points made above are more about an overarching philosophy than hard and fast rules.
So, how do you choose where to focus your time and money? And how can you be confident that you're putting that effort into the right channels and tactics to get the highest ROI?
Time and again, studies have shown that three channels consistently outperform the others: SEO, Content, and Email Marketing.
In this study by Statista, marketers were asked which channels performed best for them, and delivered the highest ROI.
Among the many digital marketing channels to choose from, SEO, content marketing and e-mail marketing had the largest share of marketers saying that they generated the highest return on investment.
32% of marketers say that SEO drives the highest ROI.
With 30% each for both Content Marketing, and Email Marketing.
Around a third of surveyed industry professionals believed that these three tactics were highly beneficial.
As a result, more than half of global marketers declared an increase in their budgets on all three channels in the same period.
Anecdotally, in my 15+ years working in digital marketing across global marketing campaigns for some of the world's biggest brands, I can honestly say that I concur with these findings. With maybe the addition of PPC into the mix too.
This is why the title of this article is 'Why SEO + Content + Email Marketing = a Powerful Formula'!
I will show you how this approach can focus your time, budget, and attention to drive a much higher ROI from your marketing.
Let's simplify your marketing and laser in on the key activities that will help you win new customers.
The TL;DR version of this approach is:
You create long-form useful content, based on research, that helps your target market.
People find you in Google and visit your content.
You provide them with a lot of value and ask them to opt into your email list with an attractive lead generation offer.
Once opted in, you start an automated email nurturing welcome drip series.
Upon completing the welcome series, prospects are placed into your regular newsletter list (assuming they have given consent).
The more valuable content you create, the more traffic you generate, the more email addresses you sign up, the more you can nurture them towards becoming your customer.
It's a system that builds on itself. Over time, it will likely provide a lower cost per lead acquisition than you get with your paid media. You'll also be gaining an advantage over your competitors’ content by establishing yourself as a source of information for potential customers.
The SEO + Content + Email Marketing Funnel
Now that we have decided that we're only going to focus on these three areas for you, how can we build a pipeline of leads that will help you grow your business?
Here's a scalable, effective funnel that you can build:
How it works:
Identify a genuine challenge that your business/product/services can help to solve.
Create in-depth, long-form SEO content providing solutions to the challenge.
The ranking content appears for related keywords in Google and drives traffic to your content.
Provide links within your content to additional resources and content offers – these act as your lead generators.
Upon sign-up direct the user to a landing page that makes an attractive offer (free consultation, demo, trial etc.)
If they take up the offer, you can move them to another process that fulfils that.
If not, you can start your email nurturing activity.
Watch the free training webinar! Click on the image below to register.
Putting this powerful digital marketing strategy into practice:
As there's a lot to cover in the following sections, I'm breaking it up into 8 phases, covering the key stages you need to follow to execute this strategy:
Phase #1: Setting your goals
Phase #2: Target customer & audience research
Phase #3: SEO keyword & competitor landscape analysis
Phase #4: Content ideation research & strategy
Phase #5: Long-form content creation
Phase #6: Content promotion and link acquisition
Phase #7: Email marketing strategy
Phase #8: Defining metrics & KPI's
Grab yourself a cuppa and a notepad, get comfy, and we'll begin.
Phase #1: Setting your marketing goals
Successful marketing is built upon a foundation of setting goals and objectives and hitting targets. Selecting the correct goals, therefore, is a critical part of creating a successful marketing strategy.
You have to be crystal clear on what your marketing goal is.
Attempting to implement your marketing without a clear goal means you are starting work with no clear destination or direction for where you want to go. Like an explorer without a map, you'll soon get lost (sorry, but you get the point).
At Focus Mode, we're all about Focus, so we encourage you to define one true metric that will mean your campaign has been a success if achieved.
Often this will likely be leads, sales or revenue-based.
Your goals should ultimately be rooted in what the business is trying to achieve over a specific period, as defined by you. If you can make them SMART, that's even better!
Here are some questions you could ask:
How much revenue do you want to generate? Over what timescales?
Based on this, how many sales does the business need to make?
To do that, how many customers do you need?
How many leads?
What is your conversion rate from website visitor to lead?
Ok, now you know that too, how much traffic do you need?
And so on… hopefully, you get my point. No goals, no strategy.
By getting very clear on your marketing goals, you have a set of targets to inform your strategy, measure your success and optimise your activity to get a better ROI.
We go into more detail about this in our post, The Focus Formula.
Phase #2: Target customer & audience research
Target customer and audience research is an essential part of your marketing.
To stand the highest chance of meeting your marketing goals, you need to be aligned with your target customers' needs, challenges, problems, and interests. If you don't do this, your marketing may be ignored.
By understanding what makes your target customer tick, you can create content offers that motivate them to take action.
You'll also need to think about which stage of the buying process your target audience may be. In doing this, you can create relevant content, and optimise your activity better to satisfy the needs of any potential customers as they progress along your funnel – for example: from the research into consideration, comparison and purchase stages.
It would help if you created Buyer Personas where you define the characteristics of your ideal customers.
A Buyer Persona is a composite 'sketch' of a key segment of your target audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to those audiences.
These typically include their needs and interests, background, demographics, industries, behaviour, purchase history and other data points that can identify that it is the person you want as a customer.
Phase #3: SEO keyword research & competitor landscape analysis
Now that you've set your goals and have a clear idea of who you want to target and their challenges, you can move into your SEO keyword research and competition analysis phase.
Before you begin, brainstorm the topic areas you think your customers are interested in and where your competitors may also be winning SEO traffic.
There are four main steps to consider.
Step 1: The first step is to find keywords with a high enough search volume. Search query volume is an indicator of the level of interest people may have in a particular topic. You want to be sure that if you manage to secure a ranking in Google for that keyword, you will get enough traffic for it, and therefore, it's worth the effort. You can use tools to find out how many people are searching for your target keywords each month, detailed below.
Step 2: The second step is to assess how competitive each topic is. Is it going to be challenging to rank for your target keywords? Your keyword research and selection should be targeting keywords you have a chance of ranking for. For example, if your website gets 500 visitors a month, how likely do you think it will be that Google will rank you highly for a keyword that gets 10,000 searches per month?
It isn't just which keywords you want to rank for, but which keywords aren't so competitive you stand a good chance of ranking. We've written more about this idea in an article called Traffic Tiers and the SEO Avalanche Technique.
Step 3: Search intent. Review your keyword list and the search engine results pages (SERPS) for those keywords to ascertain a person's goal using that keyword. Are they looking for products? Information? Services? Comparison? You need to understand the intent behind the search to match your content to that intention.
For example, it's not very likely that you will get a good ranking for an article if the search results are mostly landing pages for products. And visa, versa.
Step 4: The final step is to assess which stage of the buying process is the person at? Or, where in the funnel?
Is the keyword Top of Funnel (TOF) with a very broad intent? Typically, these phrases have fewer words and much higher search volumes. Or is it Middle of Funnel (MOF) or Bottom of Funnel (BOF)? Bottom of Funnel keywords are generally longer tail phrases with more words (or clear signals like 'buy'), lower search volumes, but that show stronger commercial intent.
In short, ask yourself where your target customer might be on their journey – information gathering (TOF) or closer to purchase (MOF or BOF). You need to create content that helps them at every stage.
There are lots of tools you can use for your keyword and topic research. We like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Google AdWords Keywords Planner, and Ask the Public.
Phase #4: Content ideation research & strategy
Armed with your keyword research and competitor analysis, you can now start the fun content ideation process to build out your content marketing strategy.
You should have defined your topics of interest and mapped them to the different purchase stages, and you can start to develop ideas for valuable and engaging content that you can create around those topics.
We have a very effective way of running a Content Ideation Workshop rooted in data and will always uncover at least 30+ solid ideas for content assets. Drop us a line if you'd like to discuss this.
When you have decided what you're going to create from your bank of ideas, you should plan those into a content calendar with dates. Build out a timeline of who will do what and by when. Having it all mapped out helps keep things efficient and gives momentum to your content marketing efforts.
To find out how long your articles need to be, take a look at the top 5 ranking posts for any given topic and review why they might be ranking highly based on word count, structure, imagery, headlines etc. If you want to stand a chance of beating them in the rankings, you'll need to create something of equal, if not greater, depth and length.
You don't want to copy these posts, but by all means, take 'inspiration' from the topics and sub-topics that seem to be important across any given area. Remember, your job is to create something better. If it's not better, why should you outrank them?
It's important to convey how your company, products and services are unique and how you think about things that may be different to your competitors. Where they all zig, you could zag! To do this, you'll need to match your branding, USP's, and positioning to your content.
To get more from your content efforts, you can repurpose the articles into various formats (social media posts, infographics, short videos, presentations etc.)
Phase #5: Long-form content creation
The next step is to take all of the information you've gathered and create a detailed brief for your writers. The more information you can give, and the clearer the direction, the stronger your article will be.
You should aim for at least 1,000 words to cover a topic comprehensively. More words if the subject requires it. You neither want to puff out an article just for the sake of it nor be too brief that you don't go deep enough into the details. Google favours depth and expertise.
Below is a list of the information we include in our briefs:
Article name – this is more to give them an overview, rather than the final headline of the article
Background – information on the business, sector, products and services, list of competitors, and any other information you think may be useful
Article objectives – what are you trying to achieve? What calls to action might you need?
Target keywords – from your research
Target audience
Exact deliverables required – article length, images, videos etc. – in short, everything you need to be able to publish
Links to 3rd party research – if applicable
Internal links to other useful website content, products, and services
Valuable resources – white papers, reports, industry updates etc.
If you'd like a copy of our copywriting briefing template, drop us a line, and we'll send one over.
Phase #6: Email marketing strategy
The next step is to build out your email opt-in strategy to turn all those new visitors into subscribers.
Email marketing is a highly effective, and scalable way to promote your business to a list of subscribed members who have given their permission for you to communicate with them.
You can create email campaigns that build relationships with prospects, nurture current customers, keep them informed about your business, and customise your marketing messages. It's about the right message, to the right person, at the right time!
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and conversion-driven forms of digital marketing. It's powerful, persuasive and done correctly, and it will get you outstanding results, and ROI.
Here are the four stages we follow to set up a high performing email marketing machine:
#1 Data Capture
To be successful at email marketing, you need to have a way to get people onto your list in the first place. The first step is to make sure it's easy to sign-up for your emails within your content. It doesn't mean that you have to plaster a sign-up form everywhere, but it does mean that you need to subtly and intelligently present your audience with compelling reasons to sign-up at the right moments as they interact with your content.
We use Convertful. You can easily add forms and pop-ups within the content without the need for programming skills.
#2 Create a Lead Magnet
You need to give your visitors a convincing reason to sign-up for your list. It's all about value exchange. They share their email address, and you provide them with something they want. Some effective examples: courses, guides, e-books, free samples, and templates.
#3 Email Platform Set-up
Your email marketing strategy won't work without an email marketing platform. A lot of people are already using MailChimp, which is a great starting point. At some point, it might be worth moving to something slightly more sophisticated.
We use ActiveCampaign. It's just as easy to use, with excellent automation capabilities, CRM and outstanding deliverability.
#4 Write the emails
This is where a lot of email marketing campaigns fall short. They start well, then business and life get in the way, and before you know it, you haven't sent an email to your list for six months. Hmmm. Not great.
If you don't have the resources in-house to create a bank of emails that you can send over a period of time, we can work with you to define the ideal cadence of emails and create a bank of content ideas ready for creation. We can then write everything for you or work with you on them.
Phase #7: Content promotion and link acquisition
Once you have made any last edits and published the article on your company's website, you need to promote that content!
Have you ever heard the Content Marketing Pareto principle: 80% distribution / 20% creation?
It says you need to spend 20% of your time creating the content, and 80% of your time-sharing, promoting and distributing that content.
But I'm not sure I entirely buy that ratio. It seems like too much to me.
Why?
Because the more time you spend on creating amazingly useful content, the less you will have for promotion and distribution. Unless you have dedicated, separate resource for content creation, and content promotion, this is a pretty aggressive split.
I think a split of 70/30 promotion/creation is perhaps more reasonable. Maybe even 60/40.
It all depends on the content.
A really great piece of content should garner attention, and therefore Google rankings, traffic and links, by merit of its quality.
This is something that many other companies don't do but can be an integral part of SEO success.
We also like to 'boost' posts on LinkedIn to reach a wider audience and build your following. You've spent all that time and energy creating the content; it makes sense to invest a little budget into promoting it, doesn't it?
Link building is an essential part of the process, if not challenging, and time-consuming. Often there's a lot of effort goes in without a lot of progress. It can be a grind.
If you have a PR team or relationships with journalists, and bloggers, now is the time to use them!
Another way that often yields positive results is to reverse engineer the links of the top-performing websites in Google for your target keywords. Then, you can approach the sites that link to those competitors to ask if you can have a link too.
To stand a chance with this, you MUST have a very high-quality piece of content and something significantly better than those top 10 articles.
There are tools you can use to uncover these competitor backlinks. We like SEMrush, Moz and Ahrefs.
Phase #8: Defining metrics & KPI's
Writing a detailed overview of setting and tracking metrics and KPI's is beyond the scope of this article. But, tracking the right metrics and KPIs for every campaign is critical to assess performance and make tweaks to improve your efficacy marketing efforts.
You should define your targets at the outset and measure your work based on them.
Here are some possible metrics you can track:
Search engine rankings for target keywords
Traffic (sessions, users, new users)
Click-through-rate (CTR)
Page Views
Button clicks
KPI's:
Downloads
Newsletter sign-ups
Leads
Sales
Revenue
ROI
The above lists are just a few examples. There are potentially hundreds of metrics and KPI's you could track (although we wouldn't recommend it).
A simple way of thinking about it is that the metrics should tell the story behind your KPI performance. They contribute to achieving your marketing goals by clarifying the different actions and events that may occur and that will influence the success or failure of the work.
To sum up
Thanks for reading this far!
We understand how difficult it is to plan, implement and optimise high performing digital marketing campaigns without wasting loads of time and money testing things out.
By following these eight steps detailed in this article, you should have a clear path to focusing your marketing efforts on the activities that will yield you results in the medium to long term.
Your marketing goals and objectives should guide every aspect of your digital marketing strategy – from the early ideation phases to the implementation and optimisation processes.
We advise all clients and people that we speak to who are considering investing in SEO, content marketing, and email marketing is that you need to commit to the long term. The activity builds on itself, you learn lessons, and over time, your efforts will pay off.
Here are just a few of the results we've driven for our clients with this approach.
View our case studies to find out more.
A final point is that this information is only valuable when you act on it! Take a step today. Whether it's planning a new article or working on your email sign-ups, you will only succeed by doing. Good luck!
If you'd like to have a chat about any of the ideas covered in this article, drop us a line. We'd love to chat!
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